Cookies

We use cookies on this website - what is a cookie?

A small piece of text stored on your computer, phone or whatever you use to surf the Internet. Cookies have many uses, but they are mainly used to store information about you on your computer.

We would encourage you to accept the cookies our site uses as they help us to improve your user experience.

We may use both session Cookies (which expire once you close your web browser) and persistent Cookies (which stay on your computer until you delete them) to provide you with a more personal and interactive experience. We also use log files and Cookies to keep track of your login name, passwords, and the pages you have visited on the site.

If you would like to delete or reject cookies

Our recommendation would be that you allow the cookies we set by this web site as they help us to provide a better service to you.

If you decide do not want to receive cookies from this website, select cookie settings under the privacy settings in your browser options, then add our domain to the list of websites you do not want to accept cookies from.

Under settings you can also delete individual cookies or any cookies that your browser has stored. Further guidance can be found here.

If you set your browser to refuse cookies, please be aware that there may be functionality on various web sites that do not work.

First party cookies

myStirling

Stirling Council uses cookies for its myStirling section on the website. This is necessary for you to login and searches for your address. This uses a single session cookie for this purpose

These are necessary to deliver a customer focused experience as they hold information when the user moves between pages. They do not hold any personally identifiable or sensitive data and are only temporary, and should be deleted by the browser when the user leaves the web-site.

Real-time analytics

Stirling Council uses a custom cookie to help us understand the journey of the customer thus enable us to be reactive to their trends and ensure they can find the information they are looking for in a timely fashion.

Online Payments – Civica

Stirling Council uses an online payments system on our site so that you can pay Stirling Council bills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This includes bills or invoices for Stirling Council services.

Current usage of these products purely uses ‘session cookies’. These are necessary for the application to work as they hold information when the user moves between pages. They do not hold any personally identifiable or sensitive data and are only temporary, and should be deleted by the browser when the user leaves the website.

Third party cookies

Google Analytics

Stirling Council uses Google Analytics to collect information about how visitors use our site. This information is used for reporting purposes and to help us improve the customer experience on our site.

Analytics uses its own cookie to track visitor interactions. The cookie is used to store information, such as what time the current visit occurred, whether the visitor has been to the site before, and what site referred the visitor to the web page.

Bookmark and Share / Add This

Stirling Council uses the Add This functionality to allow our users to share content from our site with others through popular social networking sites.

YouTube

Stirling Council uses YouTube for our video content, which is then embedded within our site.

YouTube uses cookies. For example, to monitor the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and to monitor visitors and pages viewed.

Social media - Facebook & Twitter

Stirling Council use Facebook & Twitter to keep customers up to date with our latest news and events

Twitter uses cookie technology to collect additional web site usage data and to improve their site and service. They do not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information.

Summary of cookies

The following table attempts to identify all cookies you may encounter on the Stirling Council website.

What

Name

Purpose

Session cookies

mystirling

PHPSESSID

JSESSIONID

ASP.NET_SessionId

A unique random string that allows the site to store information on the server about a particular visitor. These do not contain any human readable personal data and are used for critical website functionality (such as logging in, remembering postcode, payments, etc.)

myStirling

CakeCookie[autoLogin]

CakeCookie[logged_in]

myStirling sets a few cookies to remember if you want to be logged in automatically and to persist the personal greeting seen at the top right.

Google Custom Search

PREF

Our site search, powered by Google, saves some preferences in a cookie.

Google Analytics

__utma

__utmb

__utmc

__utmz

Analytics cookies (provided by Google, Inc.) are used to allow us to understand which pages are you currently accessing on the website. It allows us to enhance your user experience by adding new features and functionality based on what you require from our site.

YouTube

ACTIVITY

GEO

PREF

recently_watched_video_id_list

use_hitbox

VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE

We use the video-sharing website YouTube to embed video content on our site. The video player sets some cookies to track play counts, recently watch videos and sharing of videos.

AddThis

loc

ssh

sshs

ssc

dt

di

uid

uvc

uit

psc

Our site allows sharing of news and events through popular social networks using the AddThis plugin. This plugin tracks the number of shares and stores user preferences using cookies.